Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  At last the fronts crumbled, the nationalists advanced.

  —The first nationalist soldier I saw was a very young man – so young that he seemed only a lad even to me – riding a fine horse and wearing a helmet. It was that day or the next that my father heard the news that his son Timoteo had been executed in Algeciras. From that time until his own death seven years later, he never raised his head again. He was completely overwhelmed with grief …

  Juan, too, was shocked. He had been very fond of his brother. All the children in the township had liked Timoteo who told them stories which many of them could remember forty years later – stories which always contained a social message.

  —But perhaps because of the impassioned atmosphere after the nationalist victory in Asturias, or because my brother’s death seemed something of a blot on the family’s reputation and I tried to repress it – or again perhaps because my relatives tried not to talk about it – for some or all of these reasons, I continued to sympathize with the nationalists. In some way or another I was able to disassociate the nationalists – whose campaigns outside Asturias I plotted on maps – from my brother’s assassination. It was only later, when I saw other things, that suddenly reality was borne in on me …

  One of these things was the sight of the fugitives being brought in dead. Manhunts were organized by the military and villagers to shoot them.

  —When they killed some of them – people who had fled, who were living in the mountains as guerrillas to a certain extent – they celebrated their success with a sort of fiesta, with plenty of food and drink. One of the dead, I remember, was a neighbour of mine, the son of a bourgeois, who had become a socialist. His father was assassinated when the nationalists took Pola de Lena; and his son, who had married in the trenches – that’s to say, without a religious ceremony – fled with his wife and baby to the mountains. They were hunted down and shot in a mountain shack: father, mother and baby. Then the corpses were brought down. Several hundred people were killed like this. I was only a kid but I can remember the names of at least thirty of them …

  During the war, as after it, there was a silence among the brothers about Timoteo’s execution. No one talked about it.

  —No one wanted to talk about it. After the war it was a question of keeping alive; there was considerable fear. My falangist brother was wounded fighting for the nationalists on the Aragon front and died in 1944. Francisco, the second oldest, also served in the nationalist army as an officer. The family was divided by the war. It is only recently – nearly forty years later – that I and the brother immediately older than I have tried to find out the actual circumstances of Timoteo’s death … 30

  * * *

  Episodes 10

  Evacuees

  About a month before the fall of Gijón, the Council of Asturias, which had previously prohibited all evacuation, permitted a great number of children to be sent abroad. Some 1,200 youngsters, between the ages of two and twelve, embarked on a French freighter in the last week of September for St Nazaire; there, they boarded a Soviet passenger ship for the voyage to Leningrad. It would be more than twenty years before many of these evacuees were to see their native land again.

  Twelve-year-old Nicolás FERNANDEZ, from Oviedo, had been in a summer camp when the war started. At the end of the three-week holiday, the children were told they could not return home because there was a general strike. After waiting fourteen months, his whole camp was evacuated to the Soviet Union. Juan RODRIGUEZ ANIA, the eleven-year-old son of an Oviedo policeman, who had managed to get his six children out of the city in the early days of the siege before meeting his death fighting with the Popular Front forces, was also aboard, with his brother and two sisters. At their orphanage they had been given the choice of going to England, France or the USSR. Their uncle, a communist, had chosen the latter.

  The arrival in Leningrad Juan remembered as ‘like reaching paradise after being in hell’. As soon as they had had a medical examination and a bath, the children were shown into an enormous room where a profusion of suits were hanging from hooks. Each child could choose what he wanted.

  —We ran round taking a pair of trousers here, a jacket there. The suits were split up, but the Russians didn’t seem to mind. Then we were taken to the Astoria Hotel, one of the best in Leningrad. We had never seen a hotel like it. They ended up by having to remove the room telephones because we spent all day ‘ringing up’, talking to no one, of course. They gave us enormous meals in the hotel restaurant, and the orchestra played for us – La Cucaracha, it always was! …

  While Juan and his brother and two sisters remained in the hotel for several months – moving later to children’s houses in the city – Nicolás and others were sent to House No. 1, a former workers’ rest home, some 45 km from Moscow. To begin with it was the food that made the biggest impression on him: a large plate of caviar, followed by porridge, eggs, bread and butter, cocoa, for breakfast; half a chicken per child for lunch – ‘It was amazing!’ But in a short while he began to realize that this was but a small part of what they were being given. The Russians were determined that they should lack nothing; not merely the essentials, but the best.

  —Our football team was trained by a first division player from Moscow; our dance group by a Bolshoi ballerina; our orchestra by a master of the great theatre orchestra. We had our own football stadium, ice rink, motorboats on the reservoir, cinema. Once our group said it wanted to go up in an aeroplane. We were taken 200 km to a flying school where, I remember, my pilot was a young woman. Later, they gave us a complete aeroplane – a trainer in perfect flying condition – so that we could study it …

  —It was unforgettable, recalled Juan. The Russians looked after us with the greatest devotion, spoiled us endlessly. The fact that they had been through a civil war themselves made them even kinder to us, although the Russians have a great love of children at all times. We, who were little more than savages really, lived the life of grandes señores …

  One day, his house was taken round the Mikoyan chocolate factory where each worker told them about his job and gave them sweets. Their pockets bulging, they wondered what the manager would say when they were taken to see him. But instead of reproof, he told them how he had taken part in the revolution, had been a worker in the factory himself before becoming manager; finally he produced two boxes of chocolates for each child. Laden down, they climbed aboard a tram and began to throw sweets out of the window.

  —To our great surprise, children in the streets began to pick them up. ‘What are they doing that for?’ the boy next to me said. We were so spoiled, we believed that everyone else was like us. It was a terrestrial paradise and we couldn’t imagine we were an exception. Later, when we had to confront reality, it caused some of us quite a shock …

  There was no comparison, thought Nicolas, between Spanish and Russian education. In the Soviet Union nothing was left to chance, everything was programmed and planned. All the teaching was in Spanish for the first years, but followed the Russian syllabus with Russian textbooks rapidly translated into Spanish. ‘The teachers were real slaves of the pupils.’ Not the smallest detail was overlooked. A man stood at the door every morning in winter as they left for their classrooms to make sure that each child was wearing galoshes. Each group had an instructor who was with them from the moment they got up until they went to bed to see that they washed and dressed, got to meals and to class. It was her task to see that the children’s clothes and shoes were in good shape, to ensure that they did their homework. At the beginning of the school year, each group met with its instructor and planned exactly what it wanted to do on each Sunday and free day throughout the year. The question of not knowing what to do on a Sunday never arose: the zoo, ballet, the theatre – nothing was left to chance.

  —The patience they showed us was incredible. If we had been in Spaniards’ hands we would have been beaten more often than I’d like to imagine. But the Russians, never! I don’t recall a single case of punishment
amongst the 500 of us in House No. 1. And we were barely civilized! Compared to Russian children, we were more spirited, did things more hurriedly, without giving a damn; our temperament was different, we were pure anarchists, everything centred round the individual. Moreover, there were the problems of getting used to the food, the language, the climate, not to speak of feeling homesick at the beginning. Yet we made the change without trauma. It was entirely thanks to the Russians’ kindness and persuasion. No Spanish potentate’s son ever lived the life we lived in those first years …

  —I have such happy memories that, were it possible, I would put my name down to live it all over again, exclaimed Juan.

  *

  For two years, many of the children had no news of their parents. The Russians were always concerned lest they lose touch with their native culture, and Spanish teachers were brought from Spain to help those who had accompanied the children when they were evacuated. Amongst the new volunteers was Rosa VEGA, the Madrid schoolteacher for whom the revolution had brought such remarkable changes as a woman.31 She had meanwhile joined the communist party, ‘mainly out of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union’, and was keen to go there for she believed that the USSR was educationally very advanced. In Valencia, where she had been evacuated, she had had the opportunity of putting new teaching techniques, especially the ‘centres of interest’ method,32 into practice. She found the Soviet Union’s concern for the children’s indigenous culture very praiseworthy, and she set off for Moscow in early 1938 full of hopes. Once there, she was assigned to a Russian school where the Spanish children were taught in a special section using Russian methods.

  Her first shock was to find even the youngest children being taught by subject – fifty minutes of arithmetic, fifty minutes of Spanish, etc. The content of each teaching period was, moreover, rigorously laid down. ‘If we went beyond it we were considered undisciplined.’ The lessons, she reflected, had evidently been designed for children with a slower learning rate; Spanish children tended to be more lively than the Russians of the same age, while the latter were more conscientious, more stable, but also more placid and docile. After a time, the Spanish teachers were able to persuade their Russian counterparts to allow the Spanish children to be taught faster, and several were able to complete two years in one. Other problems, however, rapidly confronted her.

  —It was evident that there was considerable fear of individual initiative. In each of the older children’s classes, one of the pupils was appointed as invigilator to walk up and down to ensure that the children were studying – a sort of policeman. In Valencia I had been able to leave the pupils, even those who were supposed to be difficult, to get on with their work alone because they were interested in what they were doing …

  A Spanish-speaking Russian woman was assigned to the teachers as supervisor and attended the classes, taking notes. At weekend self-criticism sessions, she would ask why such and such a child in such and such a class had been scratching the table while the teacher was writing on the blackboard.

  —‘I couldn’t see what the child was doing behind my back,’ I’d reply. ‘But the child is committing an outrage against Soviet property,’ she retorted, and she didn’t mean it as a joke. ‘More discipline is needed.’ Her peculiar ideas of discipline took up the best part of those meetings. Rather than self-criticism, she tried to turn them into criticism of others to keep us feeling frightened and insecure. But then, her task was not to be constructive; it was to be a policewoman to ensure that none of us made remarks hostile to communist orthodoxy. There was a lot of terror, a lot of fear; it was the height of Stalin’s show trials …

  An Italian who translated the Russian textbooks into Spanish used to ask Rosa VEGA to look over his translations. But any suggestion of a stylistic change brought the immediate response: ‘It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sound quite right, the important thing is that the original Russian meaning should not be distorted.’ Worse was to come; one day, the Italian disappeared. ‘Thinking he was ill, we asked where we could find him and were told, very bluntly, not to bother.’

  She fell ill and had to go to hospital. The doctors believed that she was suffering from a nervous complaint. Secretly, she felt it was true. The reality of the Soviet Union had come as a great shock after the propaganda in Spain. She was surprised to find that the USSR was poorer than her own country, that life for Soviet citizens was very hard, that clothes were still rationed and that food seemed expensive in relation to wages. As to the political conditions – they were patently harsh.

  —But in complete contrast to all this was the quite extraordinary love and affection the people had for children, invalids, the old. Never in my life have I been treated with such affection as when I was in hospital in Moscow. I saw that everyone was getting the same attention and care as I. It confirmed everything I had seen in terms of the ordinary Russian’s concern for others; at the human level it was admirable. At the educational level – ¡nada! …

  Using her illness as a pretext, she returned to Spain after six months. Before she left, women wanted to buy her clothes, her silk stockings. ‘How can you Spaniards who are only just beginning to make the revolution, dress so much better than we who have made the revolution?’ the other teachers constantly asked.

  Once in Spain, she wanted no more to do with politics. She felt disillusioned by what she had seen. In Spain, thanks to the aid the Soviet Union was providing the republic, it had seemed normal to join the communist party. But in the Soviet Union, she had felt as though she were in prison, had come to value freedom and independence as never before.

  —The party asked me to give talks about my experience. I limited myself to describing how well the Spanish children were being looked after, because that was a positive experience. For the rest – and I wasn’t an educational expert – I kept silent for I didn’t want to offend anyone …

  *

  The Basque country, where nearly 14,000 children had been evacuated, provided the single largest contingent of evacuees; but only a relatively small proportion were in the Soviet Union, the majority having been given refuge in France, Belgium and England.

  In a convent in south-west France, the four AGUIRRE children, who had been separated from their parents after the tragic air raid on Guernica and put aboard the last ship to leave Bilbao, awaited their final destination. The children wanted to get out of the convent where the conditions were bad; but when they heard an announcement – ‘All those wanting to go to Russia, form up and put their names down’ – ‘all those wanting to go to Belgium’ – Manolita, aged nine and in charge of her siblings, didn’t know which queue to join. ‘Russia, Belgium, Isle d’Oleron – it was all the same to us, one or the other might be wonderful.’ In the end there were thirty children left. The French communist CGT took them over, lodging them in a castle which had once belonged to Napoleon some 80 km from Paris. Koni AGUIRRE, aged seven, remembered the cups of milky coffee, the French butter …

  —What excellent care and attention we received! They gave us classes in every subject except religion. At first I longed for the prayers my grandmother had taught me in Basque; I longed for my parents. Sometimes I would go off on my own and cry, just thinking about my mother and father, my country. I could never forget the day of the air raid. Life seemed to have begun for me on that day. I could hardly remember anything of my life before it, even my first communion only a fortnight earlier. Everything had been wiped from my memory except the knowledge that we had no home to go back to. My last memory of Guernica was seeing our house in flames …

  Eight months passed before they had news that their parents were alive. Their mother, living now in the village of Ibarranguelua, some 10 km north of Guernica, was offered help by a Frenchman married to a woman from Guernica, to get her children back. A Franco-sympathizer, he offered to accompany her and to pay the costs. She went to the guardia civil in Guernica to try to get papers. They refused her. She was dangerous, they said. ‘I? A woman who has lost her four
children, who has lost everything, who has done no one any harm? Dangerous?’ As a result of all this her husband was briefly arrested.

  In Guernica itself a band was brought to play in the ruins one Sunday. Many of the original inhabitants had not returned; some streets remained impassable, the charred shells of houses were still standing. The band was to attract people back. ‘Do you know what I have just seen?’ said a priest who was not from the town. ‘I have seen people dancing in a cemetery.’ ‘A cemetery?’ ‘Yes. People are still buried under the rubble –’

  Hearing that efforts were being made to secure the children’s return, the CGT evacuee director called Manolita in to ask if her parents were Franquistas. No. Communists? No. ‘They’re Basque nationalists,’ she said. The director asserted that no child would be allowed to return as long as Franco controlled any part of the peninsula.

  —So our idea became one of hoping and waiting for that gentleman, Franco, to leave Spain so that we could join our parents again …

  Meanwhile, they were so well looked after that Manolita believed that another three years and they would have ended up communists.

  —Yes, agreed Koni. It was as though in place of religion they took special care of children. And as a religious person, I believe that if I had to choose between the two, the care was more important than the religion … 33

  * * *

  Juventud del Siglo XX

  Que preparas con ardor

  Un mundo libre de trabas

  Mundo del trabajador …

  Juventud del Siglo XX

  Madrid está llenito

  De fascistas ‘camuflaos’

  Cobardes y ‘enchufaos’ …

  Pero cuando la victoria

  Lleguemos a conseguir

  A todos los emboscados

  Les haremos que trabajen